Evaluation and the causal revolution

Readings

• The syllabus, content, examples, and assignments pages for this class
• Chapter 1 in Impact Evaluation in Practice¹
• Chapters 1 and 2 in The Effect²
• DJ Patil, “What Makes a Radical and Revolutionary Technology?”
  • (DJ Patil is the former Chief Data Scientist of the United States under President Obama. He gave this forum address at Brigham Young University on February 13, 2018.)
• Stephen Goldsmith, “Next Generation of Public Employees Must Understand Data and Policy”
• Hadley Wickham, “Data Science: How is it Different To Statistics?”

Slides

Important!!: In the “Class details” video, I say that there are three books for the class: the World Bank evaluation book, ’Metrics Matter, and Causal Inference: The Mixtape. That’s not the case this semseter, since we’re using the new The Effect book, which replaces both ’Metrics Matter and the Mixtape. So ignore that part of the video. The slides are updated with the correct books, though: see here.

The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

• Introduction
• Data science and public service
• Evidence, evaluation, and causation (1)
• Evidence, evaluation, and causation (2)
• Class details

Videos

Important!!: In the “Class details” video, I say that there are three books for the class: the World Bank evaluation book, ’Metrics Matter, and Causal Inference: The Mixtape. That’s not the case this semseter, since we’re using the new The Effect book, which replaces both ’Metrics Matter and the Mixtape. So ignore that part of the video. The slides are updated with the correct books, though: see here.

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Data science and public service
• Evidence, evaluation, and causation (1)
• Evidence, evaluation, and causation (2)
• Class details

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

In-class stuff

Here are all the materials we’ll use in class:

• RStudio.cloud project
• Project .zip file
• Lab slides 1: Markdown and universal writing (PDF)
• Lab slides 2: Getting started with R and RStudio (PDF)